zgz AFRICAN POLITICAL SYSTEMS
moral obligation to settle the affair by the acceptance of a traditional payment, and the wish, on both sides, to avoid, for the time being at any rate, further hostilities.
A feud directly affected only close agnatic kinsmen on both sides. One did not avenge oneself on cognates or on distant agnates. Nevertheless, we believe that the feud had a wider social connotation and that therein lies its political significance. We must first recognize that feuds are more easily settled the smaller the group involved. When a man kills a near kinsman or a close neighbour, the matter is quickly closed by compensation, often on a reduced scale, being soon offered and accepted, for when a homicide occurs within a village general opinion demands an early settlement, since it is obvious to every one that were vengeance allowed corporate life would be impossible. At the other end of the scale, when a homicide occurs between primary or secondary sections of a tribe, there is little chance of an early settlement and, owing to distance, vengeance is not easily achieved, so that unsettled feuds accumulate. Such homicides are generally the result of intertribal fights in which several persons are killed. This not only increases the difficulty of settlement, but continues between the sections the mutual hostility that occasioned the fight, for, not only the close agnatic kinsmen of the dead, but entire local communities are involved. Feud, as a choice between direct vengeance and acceptance of compensation, without the necessity of immediate settlement, but requiring eventual conclusion, is especially a condition that flourishes between villages of the same district. The kinsmen of the dead man are near enough to strike at the kinsmen of the slayer and far enough from them to permit a temporary state of hostility between the local communities to which the parties belong. For whole communities are of necessity involved, though they are not subject to the rigid taboos that a homicide imposes on close agnatic kinsmen of slayer and slain, nor are they threatened with vengeance. Nevertheless, their members are, as a rule, closely related by cognatic or affinal ties to the principals and must assist them if there is an open fight. At the same time, these communities have frequent social contacts, "so that eventually the mechanism of the leopard-skin chief has to be employed to prevent their complete dislocation. The feud thus takes on a political complexion and expresses the hostility between political segments.